56 Days by Catherine Ryan Howard

Today

Lee stands on the kitchen side of the breakfast bar with her notebook open in front of her and a pen in her hand. Karl is in the doorway that connects the living room to the hall, leaning against the frame, arms folded. Laura Mannix is perched on the farthest seat of the couch, rocking back and forth a little, wringing her hands in her lap, head down.

The balcony door is open all the way and both Lee and Karl are wearing masks. It isn’t ideal, but they can’t have this conversation anywhere anyone else might overhear.

“Right,” Lee says to Laura. “Tell him what you told me.”

She has no idea how cooperative this woman is going to be. During the ten minutes they spent alone together, waiting for Garda Claire O’Herlihy to find Karl and bring him up here, Laura oscillated between bouts of cocky indignation and brittle nervousness.

When she speaks now, her tone hits somewhere in the middle.

“I’m a journalist. Currently the senior producer on The Jason Dineen Show. Previously features editor for ThePaper.ie.”

Karl greets this news with a shake of his head that Lee knows him well enough to know means he’s not angry, just disappointed.

“Tell him why you’re here,” Lee says. “When you own a house in Dundrum.”

Laura looks down at her hands and mumbles something.

“Try telling us at an audible level.”

“I said”—she’s flipped back to indignation—“I’m here because of the Mill River case.”

Lee and Karl exchange a glance.

Karl says, “Do elaborate.”

“It’s a long story.”

“Oh, do you have somewhere you need to be? Apologies, but we have a guy putrefying downstairs so we’d really appreciate it if you could spare us just a few minutes of your time.”

Laura glares at him. “I was at the Tribune back then. When it happened. We all knew their names, it was an open secret. A few months back, a group of us go out for pints and someone brings it up. One of the guys, a crime correspondent, says he heard that St Ledger was in London, living it up. Girlfriend, good job, the lot. And I thought, Well, that’s just the kind of injustice our listeners would want to know about—”

Karl mutters, “Be unnecessarily outraged about, you mean.”

“—so I started doing a little digging. Figured if I found anything tangible, I could use it for the show but also get a feature out of it too, maybe.” A pause. “And I wouldn’t call it unnecessary, Detective. He’s a convicted murderer.”

“Who served his time. And it’s Detective Sergeant.”

Karl correcting her on his rank, Lee knows, means Laura is definitely not on the Christmas-card list.

“You can’t report his name,” he continues. “Or risk identifying him in any way. So what good is a feature to you?”

“I can change identifying details. And there’s still plenty to write about. There was that case last year, with the two teenagers—they couldn’t report their names but they still got column inches out of it, didn’t they?”

Column inches, long-form articles, front-page headlines—for weeks. Lee had remarked at the time that calling the defendants—now convicted murderers—Boy A and Boy B only served to increase the public’s appetite for information, because without their names and faces, without details about their home lives or their hobbies or their family backgrounds, without their ordinariness, they were untethered from normality from the get-go and ascended to the ranks of Evil Psycho Killers right away.

Just like how, last year, the faceless, two-decades-long terror of the serial killer known as the Nothing Man had been instantly vaporized by the reveal of his actual name: Jim.

“I got a tip,” Laura says, “that actually, something had happened in London, something went wrong, and St Ledger is on his way to Dublin, to work at a company owned by a family friend. All I was given was the name of the company, but that was more than enough to find him.”

This is the point at which, when Laura talked about this the first time, out on the balcony, Lee had put a stop to it, and ever since the next question has been waiting patiently on her tongue.

“How?”

Laura shrugs. “I have my ways.”

Lee and Karl say nothing; they just wait her out.

“Fine. I used the Wayback Machine.”

Karl says, “The fucking what now?”

“TheWay-backMa-chine.” Laura pronounces each syllable distinctly, as if she’s talking to someone who’s still learning English. “It’s an internet archive that takes snapshots of websites and stores them. You can put in any URL and find out what that page looked like on, say, twelfth January 1999 or sixteenth September 2012. If the archive took a snapshot of it, that is. The further back in time you go, the less you find, of course. And it’s really only the major sites when you get way back. But it had a snapshot of the KB Studios ‘Meet Our Team’ page from a couple of months ago, so I was able to compare that with the current one and identify the new hires. There were two. No pictures or much of a bio—they were clearly junior members of the team—but one of them had a Swedish name and had recently worked in Dubai, and the other was called Oliver Kennedy and had previously worked in London. It wasn’t exactly rocket science.”

“But how did you know it was him? The Oliver you were looking for?”

“That was my next job. Like I said, there was no picture of him on the company website, and no social at all, nothing—which I took as further confirmation. I had to get a look at him in person. I tried a few different things but, in the end, what worked was patience. I sat in the window of the café directly opposite the building and watched everyone who came in and out. About three days in, I saw a guy who could be St Ledger—right age, right coloring—come outside with the managing director of KB Studios, who I knew from his photo on the website. And when I got a closer look, I knew. It was him. No doubt.”

“How could you possibly—”

“It’s the ears,” Laura says. “They don’t change with age. You can always tell by comparing the ears. And he was going by Oliver Kennedy. Kennedy was St Ledger’s mother’s maiden name. I mean, come on. It’s like he wanted me to find him.”

Karl swears under his breath.

“How did you know what the ears looked like in the first place?” Lee asks. “What did you have to compare them to?”

“Photos. In the primary school’s newsletter.”

“And where the hell did you get that?”

“Same place I got the tip, let’s just say.”

“Which was where?”

“I can’t reveal my sources. I won’t.”

“Let’s come back to that.” Lee is having to work to keep her voice even; her patience is wearing thin. “So, you get a tip-off that Oliver St Ledger is coming back to Dublin to work at KB Studios. You figure out that a guy about the right age using the name Oliver Kennedy, his mother’s maiden name, starts work at KB Studios shortly thereafter. You see a guy come out of the office that’s a visual match for a photo you have of Oliver St Ledger, plus seventeen years. That about right?”

Laura nods. “Yeah.”

“But how did you end up here? In his apartment building?”

“I just followed him. He doesn’t drive, he walks everywhere. Um, walked. I looked the place up online, just to see if maybe there was a unit for sale or something so I could get inside, have a look around, and this listing came up. Short-term let.”

“I meant what were you planning on doing?”

“Collecting more information. Approaching him, maybe. Eventually.”

“Did you?”

Laura looks away. “No. But I did speak to his girlfriend.”

For a moment, Lee thinks she’s misheard. She looks to Karl, who says, “His girlfriend?”

“Yes. His girlfriend. Her name’s Ciara.”

Laura can’t keep the triumph off her face; she’s clearly enjoying telling them something they didn’t already know.

“Did she come here with him from London?” Karl asks.

“Don’t know. Her accent was Irish, though. Cork, I thought.”

“And what was the highlights reel from that conversation?”

“Conversations, plural. There were two.”

“Did you tell her who you were?”

“Hardly. There wouldn’t have been a second conversation if I had.”

“What about a last name?”

“Didn’t get it.”

“Did she know about his past?”

A beat passes.

“I don’t know,” Laura says then. “I thought if she didn’t know, I should warn her. But I kept it vague. I told her I knew he’d done something bad and that his last name wasn’t really Kennedy. And she said . . .” Another shrug. “Well, not much.”

Karl is getting a little red in the face.

“Right,” he says. “So. To recap: you, a complete stranger, walk up to this woman and say, hey, I know your boyfriend’s done some bad shit and his last name isn’t really what he says it is, and her reaction was ‘not much’?”

“I figured she was protecting him.”

Lee considers this, lets it percolate. Either this mystery girl was in a relationship with a convicted murderer and was protecting him from Laura or . . .

Lois Lane here had the wrong Oliver.

Karl asks Laura when she last saw this woman.

“Probably . . . three weeks ago?”

“Were they living together?”

“Could’ve been.”

“So,” Lee says, “you never actually spoke to him, but presumably this Ciara woman relayed your conversations . . .”

“I sent him a note. I dropped it in his letterbox. Explaining that I didn’t want to expose him necessarily—”

Karl snorts.

“—but I did want to talk to him. Hear his side of things. I never heard back.” She folds her arms, lifts her chin. “Look, I wasn’t wrong. I know it was him. And I didn’t do anything wrong here. I wasn’t harassing them—”

“Yeah, right,” Karl mutters.

“—and by law I couldn’t have revealed his name or where he was, but maybe the fact that he thought he was about to be exposed . . . Maybe that’s why he did what he did.”

“You seem very cut up about it,” Karl deadpans.

Laura glares at him. “I didn’t do anything wrong. He did. It’s not my fault he couldn’t live with himself.”

“We found an envelope,” Lee says, “in the letterbox for apartment one addressed to Oliver St Ledger. That from you?”

Laura nods.

“What are we going to find when we open it?”

“Just a letter explaining that I’m not trying to expose him, I’m only trying to talk to him.” Her eyes widen. “Are you saying he never got that?”

“When you first spoke to me, before my colleague here came and joined us, you indicated that you’d never been inside apartment number one.”

“Why would I have been?”

“So you haven’t?”

“No.”

Lee has been taking notes while Laura speaks; now, she makes a show of setting down her pen. She pinches the front of her mask and pulls it away from her face for a couple of seconds, letting some air in, breathing it in, and moistening her lips because every time she talks for too long with this thing on, she ends up feeling like she’s been lying facedown in desert sand. Then she lets it go, fixes it back into position, and picks up her pen again.

“Here’s what we’re going to do, Laura. That was all very interesting. Fascinating, even, at times. But I’m going to ask you to tell us it all again, right from the beginning, only with one little difference.”

Laura looks confused.

“Thistime,” Lee says, “you’re going to tell us the truth.”